Death Note is a new adaptation of a well-liked anime series from Japan, based on the premise of a book that kills anyone whose name you write in it, and also that the two smartest people in the world just happen to be Japanese teenagers. Though here, it's done in English and with all American actors in an American high school setting.
As you all know, anime fans traditionally love it when American directors put a bunch of loud white kids in adaptations of their favorite things, so I'm sure this went over really well. Let me check the internet comments and reactions to this and I'll get back to you!
Director: Adam Wingard
Starring: Nat Wolff, Lakeith Stanfield, Margaret Qualley
Co-written with Michelle.
Okay, it turns out I was wrong and a lot of people really hate it – and for a lot more reasons than the generalization I just made in the first paragraph. I sure didn't know that before sitting down to do a review of it!
This thing starts off with a normal American high school, with people cheerleading and playing football while a sappy alt rock song whines over-top. It's not really all that befitting of this story.
How did the anime start again?
Huh. A bit different, then. But I am not one to dwell on petty differences. Let's move on to extreme differences, like main character Light, now played by Nat Wolff of Paper Towns and The Fault In Our Stars. Those were great films and he's a very promising actor – who also happens to be completely unfitting for this role.
I mean, he just isn't at all what this character should have been. I wouldn't be complaining that much if it was a well-written role, but instead of the cunning mastermind of the original series, he kinda acts like a character out of a Judd Apatow film. He's just kind of a bumbling goofball, and doesn't come off as terribly smart or interesting in any way. One of the first scenes is of him getting in a fight to defend this girl from bullies, and then the school rewards him for that by giving him detention for having a bunch of papers he was writing for other kids in his backpack. Some people just have no chill.
Then he finds the Death Note, the magic book that lets him kill whoever he wants as long as he writes down their name while thinking about their face. Gee. Hope he doesn't mistake this for a diary and write about any crushes of his, right? That would be a real fuck up. Apparently there are like 100 different “rules” in the Death Note, which must be boring as fuck to read. I mean, I'm surprised Light just doesn't skim through it in a “TL, DR” way. Why don't the Death Note makers just put it in Instagram form instead? That would truly reach the millennial generation.
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| ZZZZzzzzZZZZZ... |
The death god Ryuk then appears in the school, the only supernatural being that looks exactly like Willem Dafoe. I find it funny that Dafoe voiced this character and did not act as him – considering Ryuk is one of the only characters in existence, along with the Green Goblin, seemingly written specifically with Dafoe's distinctive face in mind.
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| Dafoe was too talented to actually appear in the movie. |
This causes Light to scream like a little girl and hide underneath a desk for a scene that goes on quite a long time for a movie that seems to want this character to be cool or badass. Not really a great way to show THAT...
I guess he to write down the name of this idiot bully at school, having him decapitated by a ladder that falls off a truck after a crash – did we just slip into a Final Destination movie?
At home, Light gets into a totally natural and realistic conversation with his father, who is a cop. They talk about how Light's mom was killed by a random mafia gangster type of guy at some time in the past, because that happens all the fucking time in America in the modern day.
Then of course there's that old cliché family drama that only happens when a gangster kills your mom – there are no other ways to create authentic drama between family members, after all. I hope you liked this bit of pointlessly transparent exposition – because it won't lead to any meaningful character development. Light has the gangster guy killed off a few minutes later in a horribly violent way while eating dinner at a fancy restaurant. Glad this was in the movie at all!
The dad comes to see him a few minutes later, barging into the room without warning, and it's like geez Dad, I could've been either masturbating OR writing in a death book in here, don't you know the meaning of privacy?
The next day he decides to tell this hot chick he likes, Mia, about the Death Note and how he can kill people with it. He's lucky she is absolutely batshit insane and sociopathic. Most girls would have walked the other way, but due to the lazy writing, she's a crazy girl and wants to kill people too – and also apparently has no problem with Light talking to an invisible death god. He sure got lucky with this one.
I guess after this, the movie turns into Natural Born Killers for idiots, with the two of them scheming and plotting and killing a bunch of bad guys all over the world. Honestly, this is where the movie lost us – do these kids really seem like the types to care about bad guys all over the world? Do they even seem organized enough to pull that off? They seem to me more like they'd be sitting behind the gym smoking weed than anything else.
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| "Hey, want to make out while listening to My Chemical Romance albums?" "Sure..." |
I guess Light's dad gets pulled into the investigation, because why wouldn't a random city police detective be working on a worldwide mass-murder investigation? It just makes sense. There's a few other characters introduced, like L, a super detective mastermind who is hell-bent on catching Light because... I guess he has nothing better to do. There's also his right hand man Watari, who gives out business cards with nothing but his own name on them:
Yup. No contact information. No description of what services he offers. No titles... just a name. That's all this guy needs because he is super cool.
L is a weird, quirky detective who has oddball mannerisms, and he's actually pretty cool for the most part – until Light mind-controls Watari to go find his name. This leads Watari to go to a random house in the middle of the woods, where L was once an orphan trained to be a master detective there. If this is all sounding like drunk mad libs for a parody of a crime thriller on South Park or some shit, well, that's because it very well could be. Except here there's no self awareness. Actor Lakeith Stanfield, playing L, is actually very good, and I hope he gets into more things that utilize his talents better than this mess.
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| More press conferences should be given by weird ninjas with the American flag behind them. |
Except, uh oh, it turns out Mia has gone rogue and wants to keep killing, so she just lets him die by hails of gunfire, I guess! This is really the conflict in the last half, Light and Mia now against each other. It isn't done terribly well – but we'll get back to that in a minute.
For now, let's just check out the super long-ass chase scene between L and Light, which has finally boiled over into the proper action-movie stylings that a story about a teenager getting a notebook that kills people deserves. I'm amazed at how long this chase scene goes. Marathon runners wouldn't be able to do this shit – Usain Bolt would be tapping out for a break at some point. These guys, who spend most of the movie sitting down, are now apparently amazing athletes!
But that isn't really the point of the climax here. The climax gets to a head when Light meets Mia in this random ferris wheel at the dock, and the two fight it out over who's really going to get the book. This results in a comically over the top fight between them that really just sounds like any other teenage couple fight. I fondly remember fighting with my high school girlfriend over who was going to kill people more efficiently. It's totally ridiculous and almost impossible to take seriously as any kind of drama.
I suppose their fight was so ridiculous and terrible that it actually breaks the wheel down and causes it to fall – Mia to her death, I guess, and Light to hospitalization.
I guess, in one of the only moments in the film that actually recalls the source material, Light has actually masterminded everything so he could keep control of the Death Note, even going so far as to get some other guy to write names in it for him while he's in the hospital! Wow! Now that's a message in this fucking movie I can get behind finally – get somebody else to do the hard work for you.
So, yeah... it sucked. Bad writing, no clear character motivations, characters that seemed to change through the film purely at the whim of how smart the writing dictated them to be, and a lot of quite funny attempts at drama. This is just a bad movie. I guess I've seen worse? I mean, if that's a positive for you, that worse movies than this exist. But if you're looking for a good movie, look elsewhere.
And if you're looking for a good anime adaptation, uh, maybe stay far away from this, as if it were some Chernobyl-radioactive piece of cinema threatening to deform you and make you sterile. I don't get how these directors keep fucking up these anime movies. It'd be one thing if they made good films that were just different, but this kind of goofy shit is just bizarre – anime is from a different culture and maybe we just shouldn't try. It's OK to admit something is just different from your own world-view or culture - you don't have to fucking remake every single thing, you know.
But who am I kidding? I'm just screaming in the wind here. They're gonna keep making them.
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